Just like Wave, NaCl is an inspiring but highly technical innovation that Google started trying to attract community interest in while it was still on the drawing board. Mozilla and others have already turned their noses up at it. What Google needs to do is finish the thing quietly, build something spectacular with it, get lots of people using it, and <i>then</i> casually slip into the conversation that other browsers are welcome to use it.. if, you know, they want to.. (then shrug nonchalently).
The latest Mono 2.10 has NaCL support provided by Google. That means F#, C#, IronPython and IronRuby, and Java through IKVM, should work with little or no work.<p>This is a very exciting technical development but it remains unclear what the killer application will be.
I hope this is not ActiveX-sans-security-hole all over again. Native code has the huge benefit of being native but also the huge drawback of platform-dependent, which is a huge step backward for the openness of the Web. I only hope the use of NaCl does not take off is kept to the minimum and the absolutely necessary.<p>Even if they are talking about Portable NaCl, I have doubt about how portable they can make it.
This piece is essential to Chrome OS. It is the container for legacy code and things where it'll be unrealistic for javascript to handle for years to come.<p>Countdown to SSH client functionality in 5... 4... 3...
Soon your browser will be synonymous with your computer. There is a bunch of projects that work towards that same goal
- Chrome OS + NaCl (another part of their framework is called pepper) - WebOS - Various JavaScript SDKs (specialized like Game Closure or heavyweight like Sproutcore or small like backbone)
I always found it inefficient to 'install' software in multiple locations. It gives you a lot of headaches wrt updates, piracy etc.. I'm excited to see where this goes!
Notably not participating in the development is Apple, but I have a feeling they may be working on something like this as well (remember how the iPhone initially launched with just a JS SDK)
Their "Hello world" demo is kind of a turn off: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/source/browse/trunk/src/examples/hello_world_c/hello_world.c" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient-sdk/source/browse/trun...</a>
NaCl is disabled by default on the Cr48 development laptop. I would at least hope this means they start enabling NaCl by default in the ChromeOS source tree.
It's really a shame that JS has stuck around so long. Google is right to be looking into allowing developers to create something usable in the browser without having to use JavaScript or Flash.<p>Even Brendan Eich openly talks about JS's flaws and admits that it lacks a lot of important things, mostly attributable because he had only a few weeks to compose something to stop Netscape from doing "something worse". See <a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...</a> .<p>I greatly anticipate the day when I script a web page in Python instead of JavaScript.
This is funny because I just opened a PSD in Gmail thinking that it would throw some kind of error... but then it worked almost flawlessly! (albeit it was missing layer styles, as far as I can tell)